Summary:What might lead an innocent man to confess to something he didn’t do?
When Adrian Thomas walked into the Troy, New York police station and waived his Miranda rights, he didn’t know he was being video-recorded.
His four-month-old baby lay brain-dead in a pediatric ICU. The doctors believedWhat might lead an innocent man to confess to something he didn’t do?
When Adrian Thomas walked into the Troy, New York police station and waived his Miranda rights, he didn’t know he was being video-recorded.
His four-month-old baby lay brain-dead in a pediatric ICU. The doctors believed it was “shaken baby” abuse, and Adrian Thomas became the main suspect. And so began a psychological battle: the detectives repeatedly lied to – and manipulated – their suspect. And they reassured Adrian Thomas that if he told them what happened, the police would view it as an accident, without jail time. For the next several hours, the detectives used an array of powerful psychological techniques to ramp up the pressure and eventually extracted a confession. (Submarine Entertainment)…Collapse

A cool documentary that makes the blood boil, it examines how people can be psychologically manipulated into confessing. Not only to crimes they may not have committed but, even worse, to crimes that may never have happened.

What's remarkable about Scenes of a Crime, besides Hadaegh and Babcock's ability to stay out of the way of their story and resist flashy graphical flourishes, is the degree to which the events it reveals are business as usual.

This smart, cool-headed film, which has a "Rashomon"-like vision of the case, presents a disturbing picture of courtroom justice and how different people come to opposite conclusions, based on the same testimony.

This impassioned documentary could have the same real-world impact as Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," and help to free a wrongly convicted man. The filmmaking could be better, but it's hard to argue with that kind of potential.